Archives mensuelles : mai 2018

There is a continuing debate over sea level rise, especially how much will occur in the future. The most annoying part of the news media reporting on the issue is that they imply sea level rise is all the fault of humans.

This is why the acceleration of sea level rise is what is usually debated, because sea level has been rising naturally, for at least 100 years before humans could be blamed. So, the two questions really are (1) Has sea level rise accelerated?, and (2) how much of the acceleration is due to humans?

Yesterday’s spat between Gavin Schmidt and Willis Eschenbach dealt with the question of whether sea level rise has accelerated or not. Gavin says it has. Willis says not, or at least not by a statistically significant amount. (…)

China’s carbon emissions growth has accelerated since the beginning of the year, leading to warnings that the country could be headed for its largest annual increase in climate pollution since 2011.

Led by increased demand for coal, oil and gas, China’s CO2 emissions for the first three months of 2018 were 4% higher than they were for the same period in 2017, according to an Unearthed analysis of new government figures.

Analysts have suggested the country’s carbon emissions could rise this year by 5% — the largest annual increase in seven years, back when the airpocalypse was at its peak (…)

Corals around Japan are fleeing northwards, according to a new study. One type has been spotted ‘sprinting’ at 14 kilometres a year, thanks to a lift from ocean currents. That means ocean ecosystems could shift rapidly in the face of climate-change impacts such as warming seas, the authors say.

Inspired by Richard Keen’s interesting WUWT post on using eclipses to determine the clarity of the atmosphere, I went to the website of the Hawaiian Mauna Loa Observatory. They have some very fascinating datasets. One of them is a measurement of direct solar radiation, minute by minute, since about 1980.

I thought that I could use that dataset to determine the clarity of the atmosphere by looking at the maximum downwelling solar energy on a month by month basis. I’ve described my method of extracting the maximum solar energy from the minute by minute data in the appendix for those interested.

Most estimates of Chinese regional Surface Air Temperatures since the late-19th century have identified two relatively warm periods – 1920s–40s and 1990s–present. However, there is considerable debate over how the two periods compare to each other. Some argue the current warm period is much warmer than the earlier warm period. Others argue the earlier warm period was comparable to the present. In this collaborative paper, including authors from both camps, the reasons for this ongoing debate are discussed. Several different estimates of Chinese temperature trends, both new and previously published, are considered. A study of the effects of urbanization bias on Chinese temperature trends was carried out using the new updated version of the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) – version 4 (currently in beta production)

Over millennia, the reef has adapted to sudden changes in environment by migrating across the sea floor as the oceans rose and fell.

The study published today in Nature Geoscience, led by University of Sydney’s Associate Professor Jody Webster, is the first of its kind to reconstruct the evolution of the reef over the past 30 millennia in response to major, abrupt environmental change.

The 10-year, multinational effort has shown the reef is more resilient to major environmental changes such as sea-level rise and sea-temperature change than previously thought but also showed a high sensitivity to increased sediment input and poor water quality. (…)

This manntastic event looms large. With the irascible Dr. Mann pitted against Moore and Curry, fireworks are almost guaranteed. Titley is a lightweight and he’ll be overshadowed by Mann’s huge ego and need to control the conversation. Their idea to hear a “collegial and balanced” discussion may very well be a pipe dream, especially after what happened the last time when Mann and Curry were testifying before congress.

BIG PICTURE: The Population Bomb was first published in May 1968 – 50 years ago this month. Page one of my copy, printed in 1970, describes its author as “a qualified scientist.” The back cover provides further detail: (…)

A landmark paper by warmist scientists in Nature Geosciencenow concedes the world has indeed not warmed as predicted, thanks to a slowdown in the first 15 years of this century. One of its authors, Michael Grubb, professor of international energy and climate change at University College London, admits his past predictions of runaway warming were too alarmist.

“When the facts change, I change my mind. We are in a better place than I thought.”

ANOTHER author, Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at Oxford, confessed that too many of the mathematical models used by climate scientists to predict future warming “were on the hot side” — meaning they exaggerated.

“We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models.”

The sun was inactive in April, as we currently find ourselves in the minimum between solar cycle (SC) 24 and the coming solar cycle 25.

The recorded mean sunspot number (SSN) for April was 8.9, which is only 28% of what is usual 113 months into a solar cycle. In April, 16 days were spotless. The following chart shows sunspot activity (…)

In describing their findings, Lovell et al. state that “between 1972 and 2013, 36% of glacier termini in the entire study area advanced and 25% of glacier termini retreated, with the remainder showing no discernible change outside of the measurement error (± 66 m or ± 1.6 m yr-1) and classified as ‘no change'” (see figure below). Although there were some regional differences in glacier termini changes, these regions over the last four decades were more closely linked to non-climatic drivers, such as terminus type and geometry, than any obvious climatic or oceanic forcing.”

Sixty-six million years ago, the world burned. An asteroid crashed to Earth with a force one million times larger than the largest atomic bomb, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs. But dinosaurs weren’t the only ones that got hit hard — in a new study, scientists learned that the planet’s forests were decimated, leading to the extinction of tree-dwelling birds.

A highly precise method to determine past typhoon occurrences from giant clam shells has been developed, with the hope of using this method to predict future cyclone activity.

A team of researchers led by Tsuyoshi Watanabe of Hokkaido University has discovered that giant clams record short-term environmental changes, such as those caused by typhoons, in their shells. Analyzing the shell’s microstructure and chemical composition could reveal data about typhoons that occurred before written records were available… (…)

The whole Tridacna maxima valve. The shell was cut in two sections along the maximum growth axis.

Scientists claim that the ocean’s global mean surface pH may have declined (i.e., became less alkaline and thus more “acidic”) by -0.08 in the last 265 years — from 8.13 during pre-industrial times to 8.05 today. That’s an overall, long-term pH change rate of -0.0003 per year.

By way of comparison, from one season to the next, or over the course of less than a year, pH levels naturally change by twice that amount (±0.15 pH units). On a per-decade scale, oceanic pH can naturally fluctuate up and down by up to 0.6 units within a span of a decade (as shown in red below).